Team Bonding Football Blog

United Services Portsmouth 3 AFC Stoneham 2 23 rd September 2023 . I’m just a little too young to remember the 1982 World Cup, so can’t claim to have been inspired by one of the greatest matches of all time, not legitimately anyway. That game, Brazil versus Italy in the group stages at the Estadio Sarria, knocked arguably one of the best Brazilian sides assembled out of the World Cup, whilst simultaneously setting Italy on the path to ultimately win the tournament. It also served as a redemption arc for the Italian striker Paolo Rossi. Implicated, and subsequently banned for two years for his involvement in a match-fixing scandal, his hat-trick in the game set him on his way to win the Golden Boot as tournament top scorer, Golden Ball as the tournament’s best player, and eventually World and European Footballer of the Year. He won every domestic and European honour with Juventus, before retiring in 1987 with Verona. He passed away in 2020, aged 64. I can’t pretend that I’ve thou...

  Basingstoke Town Women 2 Weymouth Women 4 10 th September 2023. **Warning – contains swearing** Jill Scott. A Lioness. A certified legend of English football. A “heads up” type of player in that she would already have picked out her next pass or move before she had received the ball. Excellent control, skillful, with an uncanny ability to pick the right pass, whether it be a through ball to unlock a defence, or simply playing the ball to a teammate to start another attack. Everything I’ve ever seen of her in the media also suggests she is a genuinely nice human being. I’ve watched her play live twice, and both times took time away from supporting one of the teams, to just watch her on the ball. The fitting end to her career was being part of England’s successful European Championship victory in 2022, a career that saw her traverse the dawn of professionalism in women’s football in this country. She represented England 161 times, was a Great British Olympian, and won every ...

  Portsmouth Women 9 (nine) Cardiff City Women 0 3 rd September 2023. The announcement, when it came, was met with a shrug, a sigh, and then another sip of our drinks. Sat on platform one at Havant train station, the monotone announcer had given the not unexpected news that another train had been cancelled. Being a Sunday, there are only two trains an hour, so a third cancellation in a row was greeted with resignation. After a pause, my uncle broke the silence. “We could have stayed at home”. I contemplated this for a moment, whilst my daughter sat swinging her feet next to us. “Yeah…but nine goals!”. The defence rests, m’lud. I’ve always been happy watching football at any level. Since my teenage years, I would take in any game I could find on television. My parents got Sky Sports purely for me to watch the Premier League, Football League, Scottish League, La Liga. As I got older, technology improved and the game expanded globally, the ability to watch ever more obscu...

  Fleet Spurs 3 Denmead 4 Hampshire Premier League – 29th August 2023   Relegation. Sometimes, there is a crushing inevitability about it. You can look at a club on day one of the season and confidently predict a slow, lingering death of a season. Other times, a club has mishandled every big decision over a season, shoot themselves repeatedly in the foot, and their unexpected demise will stun the supporters. The term “too big to go down” can also apply, but broadly speaking, any club that gets relegated gets what they deserve. In some situations, a club can point to bad luck, a sliding doors moments when the giddy heights of mid-table swap places with a league table showing a capital “R” next to their name, below a dotted line, possibly even with a different shaded background highlighting their end of season status. Leeds United, from the moment they slipped out of Champions League football in the early part of the century, were financially and administratively mismana...

  Springboks 35 All Blacks 7. 25th August 2023   There are very few occasions I’ve attended an event that has bothered the history books. Back in my teenage years, I went to see the Manic Street Preachers play the London Astoria at the very end of The Holy Bible tour. A nose-bleedingly loud set ended with the band destroying their instruments. I couldn’t hear properly for a week after. And with most historical events, you don’t know you’ve been part of something bigger until after the fact. The gig itself went down in rock and roll folklore as being the last gig ever played by Richard James Edwards, before he disappeared the following February (I still think about that gig a lot). Sporting wise, attending A Major Event hasn’t been something I’ve managed too often, usually only managing to be at minor footnotes in history: the first Full Members Cup final, which was also my first ever football match – a nine-goal cup final at Wembley (yes, football was pretty much downh...